Fedora Weekly News Issue 131

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Board Elections open on June 13

﻿Any FAS account holder who has completed the CLA may vote in the election. Voting is open until 2359 UTC on 22 June 2008. Election results will be announced shortly thereafter. The final appointed seat on the Board will be filled after the general election as well.

Thank you to all the Board members whose seats are up for election, to Nigel Jones for our new voting application, and to the community in advance, for casting their votes for Fedora leadership."

Marketing

Correction from last week: LWN.net

In last week's marketing section, we incorrectly referred to LWN.net as "Linux World News" [1] LWN.net used to be known as "Linux Weekly News," but is now known simply as LWN.net. We apologize for the error.

India Third-Largest Contributor To Fedora Community

Rahul Sundaram forwarded [1] an interesting article from EFYtimes.com of an interview [2] with Michael Chen, Director, Red Hat where he discusses a wide range of issues and thoughts on expanding Linux and open source in India during a recent visit there. In it, Chen assets that India is the third-largest contributor to Fedora, after North America and Europe.

FedoraLife concept

Markus McLaughlin offered that it would be goodness to develop a "fedoraLife" concept a la Apple's iLife suite of applications and functionality [1], and suggested some new applications that Fedora could use to round out this feature set. A concept paper is available on Markus' blog [2] Duvelle Jones [3] mused that some of this functionality is extent in the Fedora Art Spins [4] Further discussion ensued, with Nicu Buculei reminding folks that the Fedora Art Spin project needs some new contributors to move that project forward, [5] and invited those interested to move discussion to the fedora-art-list [6] There was some further discussion on the various packages in Fedora that could meet these needs.

Hands on: Secrets of Fedora 8

Rahul Sundaram forwarded [1] another recent review of Fedora 8 [2] that concluded, "However, Fedora is perhaps the most pioneering distribution when it comes to experimenting with new technology, and for that reason some people may wish to stick with the previous release for a while longer. Fedora 8 has not remained stagnant at all, and has continued to receive very regular updates, including enhancements to security and many other areas."

Ambassadors

Release Party Contest Winner

The winner of the Fedora Release Party Contest [1] has been announced. FAmSCo was pleased to award the Fedora laptop bag to Grady Laksmono for organizing the Los Angeles, California release party. Read the full details in the announcement [2] sent to the ambassadors mailing list. All of the Fedora 9 release parties were a great success and the work put in by all ambassadors organizing and helping with a release party in their area deserve thanks for their hard work.

Fedora and Open Source Tech Day - Pavia, Italy

Andrea Modesto Rossi announced [1] on the ambassadors mailing list that Fedora will be present at the GNU/Linux, Open Source and Fedora Tech Day in Pavia, Italy on June 15th. There will be many discussions on Open Source software and Fedora.

Retiring Opyum

Debarishi Ray noted that he is retiring Opyum which handles offline package updates since PackageKit is gaining a similar feature that is going to be cross distribution as part of this year Google SoC as part of the Fedora Project.

Fedora Freedom and Linux-libre

Alexandre Oliva posted new information about David Woodhouse's effort to remove and aggregate firmware into a separate tarball. Though this was initially born out of a drive towards more freedom in software, David Woodhouse points out that are legal and technical benefits to such a move.

Requirements gathering for new package source control

Jesse Keating is driving an effort towards moving the Fedora package specification and patches to a new and better source code management tool and is a collecting requirements from package maintainers on what kind of changes are desirable.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure Secondary Offerings

Mike McGrath writes for fedora-infrastructure-list [1]

So one of the things that has made Fedora's Infrastructure successful is the amount of time we spend getting configs together and tested _before_ we go live with them. Often times re-doing things from scratch multiple times.

Artwork

With or without introduction

On the Fedora Art list Pavel Shevchuk raises an interesting question [1] about the need of a formal introduction for new members "I'm pretty sure people who really want to contribute can do it without loudmouth letters, bringing some artwork instead", Frank Murphy raises the issue of mentoring [2], where people new to FOSS may need some guidance and Nicu Buculei talks [3] about inter-human relations inside the team "spend some time together, know each other and maybe we will work better as a team" and mention about how many of the membership requests in the account system, started from the Join Fedora page [4] are not followed on the mailing list nor with real work.

Reviving the Fedora Art spin

The Art Studio spin, a customized version of Fedora geared toward creative use (graphic, sound and video editing) is an old project of the Art Team. Following a thread on the Fedora Marketing list [2], a few people expressed their [3], [4], [5] so there is a change this project will see the light is a foreseeable future.